Megyn Kelly was once talked about as the future face of NBC News — possibly as its next chief news anchor. Now, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, she has lost her perch as host of NBC's Today show at 9 a.m.
Negotiations between NBC and Kelly are ongoing, the person said.
"It's clear she will not be returning to the network," the person told NPR.
Over the past two days, Kelly has unsuccessfully sought to contain the damage from several statements she made on her hour on Today defending the desire of white people to dress up in blackface costume for Halloween.
Colleagues and people on social media reacted in outrage to her remarks, often pointing to her own past as a host on Fox News who periodically made racially charged remarks.
"What is racist?" Kelly asked Tuesday in a conversation with other panelists on her show. "Truly, you do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface for Halloween, or a black person who put on whiteface for Halloween. When I was a kid, it was OK as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character."
Kelly, who is 47, grew up outside Albany, N.Y. The television news star returned to the matter more than once during the discussion, defending a white reality show star who was castigated for dressing as Diana Ross, replete with oversized Afro wig. Her remarks tapped into a painful vein of American racial history that Kelly said, in an apology, that she was only now fully realizing.
The network gave no reply to NPR's questions on Kelly's status, though an NBC News official did tell NPR that her show would run in repeats Thursday and Friday, given the controversy.
The incident recalled past controversies at Fox News. In 2013, Kelly had infamously made racial claims for both Jesus Christ and Santa Claus: "For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white," Kelly claimed during a discussion on Fox News in 2013. "Jesus was a white man, too."
Initially, she said she had been joking. Last year, once at NBC, she told Business Insider that she regretted those remarks.
In some ways, NBC spoke most directly through its broadcasts, on which Kelly's colleagues uniformly condemned her remarks. NBC Nightly News' Lester Holt, the sole African-American evening anchor among the nation's three big broadcast networks, devoted an extended segment to the controversy, which included critical quotes from the head of the NAACP, among others.
NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack, her strongest advocate within the news division, had hired her away from Fox News in early 2017 amid a ton of fanfare and an annual paycheck in excess of $16 million. Lack notably declined to defend her at a meeting this week with staffers.
On the Today show, of which her program is a part, two African-American colleagues offered sharp rebukes Wednesday.
Al Roker said her emailed apology to colleagues was insufficient. "She owes a bigger apology to folks of color around the country, because this is a history going back to the 1830s. Minstrel shows," Roker said. "To demean and denigrate a race wasn't right."
"There was some criticism yesterday online that this was political correctness," said Craig Melvin, a new co-host at Today. "That's silly. And it's disingenuous. And it's just as ignorant and racist as the statement itself."
At the opening of her show Wednesday, just 90 minutes after Melvin and Roker spoke, Kelly apologized to viewers as well. She hasn't been seen on the air since that episode ended.
In retrospect, Kelly's implosion seems almost foreordained. She had been hired as part of Lack's effort to demonstrate that NBC News would not list to the left, despite the liberal outlook of MSNBC. She was coming from the nation's most influential outlet among Republicans and cultural conservatives: Fox News.
Kelly could also claim a sense of independence; despite Fox News' affinity for President Trump, she had clashed with him during the campaign. And she had embraced the #MeToo movement. Indeed, her accusation in July 2016 that Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes had sexually harassed her, in addition to former Fox host Gretchen Carlson, ensured Ailes' dismissal.
Yet her history at Fox News tailed her. In the summer of 2010, Kelly made a meal of a menacing but very small hate group called the New Black Panthers, saying a campaign of voter intimidation occurred. Several of them faced criminal charges for an incident in 2008, but the charges against the group were dropped after U.S. Justice Department officials said there was no compelling evidence the group itself was involved. One member was legally sanctioned. But no voters appeared discouraged from voting.
Kelly devoted hours to the New Black Panthers over a three-week period, attacking other media for failing to cover the story — and shouting down a colleague who disagreed. She apologized for that, too.
Yet she was serving red meat to the core Fox News viewer, and those programs were part of a record that helped propel her in short order from reporter to daytime host to prime-time host. And she was never able to turn the corner to offer the softer fare required of morning hosts.
Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org/.